I’m getting old. Yet writing more. And maybe better. Or maybe only with more urgency. Which might amount to the same thing, right? To get the limitations of the system more excitingly involved. Like Lindbergh’s monoplane accelerating, bouncing down the runway trying to get some air before it hits the trees—my favorite moment in the movie. The unlikeliness of everything revealed. What were we thinking? This can’t possibly hold together. I’ve had health issues as well. So I would like to make the case for pathological revelation. What emerges as the limits are approached. When things begin to break apart.
I think of Giorgio de Chirico (I tend to think of him a lot in any case), inventor, or discoverer, of that cold surrealist surface which eventually would support the weird unlikeliness of others, too, like Dalí and Tanguy. I tend to think of him recovering from severe intestinal illness in a Florentine piazza back in 1910 or thereabouts—how, in his weakened state, in the autumn light, the ancient city square became a stage whereon could be observed, and then recorded in his “metaphysical” paintings, all laid open like an anatomy lesson, the mutual detachment of the arbitrary objects of the world. The silent, airless gulf between them as imponderable as that between the stars. You get a glimpse sometimes when things go wrong. The mechanism opens up a bit and you see through it and beyond it in a way.
All through my college years I drove a much-abused VW Beetle. Drove it pretty much into the ground—to the point where you really needed a tailwind to sustain the usual highway speed of fifty-five miles per hour. On its final voyage it carried me and three others to an air show in Fort Worth where the big attraction was the recently top-secret SR-71 spy plane guarded by a rope and an armed Marine and rumored capable of speeds beyond Mach 3. I think we might have had a tailwind going out, but coming back it was a struggle for the first few miles. And then it’s like we’ve topped the hill or something. Cars no longer seem to pass us quite so frequently. My friend Jim Lynch is driving. He loved driving. But he was a little crazy. Now we’re doing sixty-five. So I lean up between the front seats and say, Hey, what’s going on? We’re pushing seventy. Jim is hugging the wheel with this wild expression and a squint like he needs goggles. What the hell? He’s got it floored. He’s not about to back it off. He’ll never get this chance again. We look around at one another. We’re beginning to pass some cars. We’re doing seventy-five and still accelerating. Holy crap. We’re quiet now. There are these aerodynamic sounds I’ve never heard before. Jim’s locked onto the wheel. He is committed. We’re at eighty. We are passing into a new regime. At any moment we might leave the road, go into hyperdrive with fenders, mirrors ripping off, the paint igniting, flaming away in flashes as we slip beyond the envelope of atmosphere and ordinary life. When you’re that age, you’ve no idea. A thing like this might be your destiny. Then suddenly just silence. Not transonic, but the engine cutting out. No bang or clatter. Just the whistling of the wind through those little side vents like we’re plummeting from altitude. Somehow we manage to coast it off the highway into a service station. Hardly even tap the brakes. We don’t need gas. It just won’t go. It’s done. We call someone to pick us up. I sell the car to one of the guys who can use the parts. A week or so later I’m informed it threw a rod—though how so violent an event could have been so quiet is a mystery. Maybe a day or two after that, my friend comes over to present me with the camshaft. He regards it as a marvel. As suggesting both a further mystery—how my car could have run at all with cams so worn and misshapen—and a plausible explanation for its ultimate performance. Proper cams—that lift and close the engine valves controlling intake and exhaust—have tapered ovoid profiles much like that of a hen’s egg. Mine have profiles more like that of a piece of popcorn. My friend speculates that, somehow, at the end, these cams had worn into a shape that suddenly duplicated the function of what’s called a “racing cam”—think of the deep, irregular gluggedy-glug of a hot rod at a stoplight, and the way it all smooths out into a roar as it accelerates away. Such engines, fitted out with racing cams, will sacrifice performance at low revs to find efficiency at speed. So, it appears we had an accidental hot rod for a moment. An ungoverned and self-generating hot rod. Had it not blown up? My God. We’d still be on our way, I guess, my friends and I, into the silent, airless gulf. Into the dark where two of us, by a different route, have gone already.
Gladice Aymare has a peculiar, almost infectious lilt to her voice—a singsong cadence that softens the hard syllables of her French. She occasionally hums between sentences, her voice barely rising above a whisper, as if she were treating her words like her patients—gently, with an almost excessive kindness that makes it hard to imagine anything could ever go wrong. Among local and expat aid workers in the Central African Republic, Gladice is a veteran on multiple fronts. Trained as a midwife in Bangui, the capital of the C.A.R., Gladice followed the peripatetic path common to aid workers. There was her first Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Boguila, a small village in the northwestern corner of the country, followed by later missions in Damara and then Sibut. She was born and raised in Bangui, but her life now is built along the borders of her country, in remote villages reached either by plane or by several days’ drive along the C.A.R.’s winding roads, which are so few in number that a map of every major road in the country can be memorized without much effort.
Gladice has, I imagine, traveled on every known path in the C.A.R., and that knowledge grants her more than just a privileged position. In the standard narrative of foreign aid, help, if not salvation, arrives from the outside, but on the distant back roads of a country like the C.A.R., nothing moves without someone like Gladice’s direction. In 2012, when a coalition of armed groups toppled the government of François Bozizé, Gladice was working in a clinic in Damara and then later Sibut. She treated war-wounded soldiers and civilians, including forty-two rape victims, alongside her usual responsibilities in the maternity wards. When later that year Gladice returned to the hospital in Boguila, she was moved to the intensive care unit, where, she notes, she was more than just a midwife. It was a sort of homecoming for a woman who had come to know her country intimately, through its hospitals and clinics, through its sick and wounded.
She recounts this particular period with an obvious whiff of nostalgia, her gaze fixed on some indeterminate point just beyond the walls of the courtyard we’re sitting in. We’ve just returned to the M.S.F. mission in Bambari, the second-largest city in the C.A.R., after two days of nonstop work in mobile health clinics. Despite the long hours and daylong drive to return to base, Gladice insists this is the perfect time to have our conversation. She speaks slowly and proudly about her work in the maternity ward and the responsibilities charged to her in the intensive care unit. Knowing how the story ends, she seems to linger deliberately on the bright spots. The Seleka forces that had swept into the capital and seized power at the end of 2012 had done so quickly, with little resistance from the military. When Gladice returned to the hospital four months after the coup, it was still possible to imagine that this vulnerable and profoundly underdeveloped nation would shrug off its latest political crisis. There had been coups and attempted coups before—but so far, in four decades of independence, the C.A.R. had never fallen victim to the type of violence that had afflicted nearly all of its neighbors, from Chad, Sudan, and South Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the hospital, there were wounded soldiers and civilians from sporadic fighting between Seleka and the former army, but it was the common daily concerns of malnutrition and malaria that demanded the most attention.
The bright spots that Gladice lingers on are centered on her former colleagues. All the staff lived next to the hospital in Boguila—a communal arrangement born out of necessity that also served as a daily exercise in bonding.
“We always ate together,” Gladice says. “We lived together. We would leave at the same time to go to work. On Sunday we went to church together.” Back in Boguila, she was nicknamed “Mamma Coffee.”
“My friends would come to my room and they would say, ‘Mamma Coffee, Mamma Coffee,’” Gladice tells me, because they knew she loved coffee, and as a lover of coffee, would make anyone who asked a cup.
Gladice never describes the bonds with her former coworkers in familial terms, although certainly there was the intimacy and proximity of family, but perhaps the term “family” is a poor substitute for the peculiar binding of work and life that comes with this type of aid work. Families separate—their members leave and go to school and work and then come together at the end of the day. At the M.S.F. hospital in Boguila, like the mobile clinics in Bambari that Gladice now attends to, no one was left alone, no one had a life alone. There was only the work and the post-work gathering that followed.
As we near the difficult part of the story, Gladice lists the names and jobs of the eight staffers who lived with her. She leans over to make sure I spell each one properly.
“Before the attack we felt very secure,” she says. “We had a guard day and night, a safe room. We had three blocks—I was the supervisor of our block, block 2. During the night we guarded the radio with us. And they [the guards] would call us on the radio if there was a problem.”
Two days before that conversation, I followed Gladice into the back of a white Land Cruiser as it prepared to leave for a mobile clinic four hours south of Bambari. There were eight adults in our SUV—six of us squeezed onto folding benches in the rear. Underneath our seats and at our sides were the building blocks that would later be used to construct a temporary clinic on a patch of grass a few hundred feet away from the country’s largest sugar factory, and the internally displaced persons’ camp huddled in its shadow.
Within a few minutes of leaving the compound, we reached the edge of Bambari—a point marked by an unofficial transfer of power from the UN forces to a pair of teenage boys in military fatigues, each with an automatic rifle dangling indifferently around his neck. The young soldiers were the first official checkpoint marking the end of government-controlled territory. Almost the entire province from that point on was controlled by an ex-Seleka militia that had rejected the peace agreements that brought a measure of stability to the rest of the country.
We were casually waved through the checkpoint without the slightest hesitation, but something was obviously different on the other side of the barrier. Here, along the road to Ngakobo, the C.A.R. was still undoubtedly at war. In Bangui, the costs of that war had been evident in the camps and in the clinics and hospitals. Here in Ouaka, the proof was in the burned homes and abandoned villages that lined the narrow red-dirt road. Ten kilometers away from that initial checkpoint, we drove past what was left of Jean-Claude Pouzamandgi’s village. Jean-Claude, a technician in the clinics, was responsible for dispensing medication, and when we neared his home—of which only half a wall and a pile of bricks remained—he leaned over from his side of the car, pointed out the window, and stated proudly that this was where he had lived, and, as he explained, would certainly live again.
For the next several hours, we drove through more burned villages and roadblocks—each barrier manned by soft-faced boys in military clothing a few sizes too large. With every one passed, it was hard not to feel that whatever security and authority had been present in Bangui, and to a lesser degree in Bambari, was eroding. We weren’t in a dangerous area; it was, in fact, just as Gladice had described it—an insecure zone. Initially that description had sounded slightly romantic, but in retrospect, it’s a phrasing generous enough to include all the threats and possible threats that make Gladice’s work necessary.
On April 25, 2014, Gladice went to bed very late. She was the designated night guard and was slow to wake the next day.
“On the morning of the twenty-sixth, I came down. At one p.m., I went to the hospital for an online course on malnutrition. I went to the office for one or two hours. I was feeling tired. It was a ten-minute walk to get to the office.
“I had two hours of courses per day. When I was finished with the two hours, I returned home to wash clothes. I had just begun to wash my nurse’s outfit. I had the radio next to me when I heard the guards begin to talk in their local language: Souma. It’s the language of Boguila.
“When I heard them talking, I asked them to talk in Sango or in French. I then had a response—the [rebels] are starting to arrive in the hospital. And then right away, there was shooting.
“In our area—Jean-Claude and Raissa and Fiacre were sleeping. I started slamming on the doors telling them to wake up, the Seleka were here. We started looking for a place to hide.
“We quit our block to hide in block 3. There was me, Jean-Claude, and Raissa. We hid in the kitchen of block 3. It was big and there was a lot of shooting. They started around two p.m. while we were in the kitchen—the kitchen was exposed, only partially brick, so we went to go hide in the shower. It was a shower with three doors. We stayed there while they continued shooting. And because I had the radio, I turned down the volume. And we stayed like that on the floor and they continued to shoot and shoot and shoot. And it was at that moment I began to pray. ‘Is it the end of my life?’ I said to God. ‘We’re here to help the people, help us. We’re here to save lives.’
“We were all in the same shower. Fiacre also began to cry. We stayed there for at least forty-five minutes of shooting. We didn’t know they were killing.
“After, there was silence, we heard the cars pulling away. And then there was calm. And then I turned up the volume of the radio. We heard the voice of our project coordinator, Will. I heard him in conversation with our nurse. We heard him say there were injured at the hospital. He gave the authority to leave and go to the hospital. The first person I ran into was Raassaoul—and it was he who told us that we lost Papa Daniel. Automatically we hugged and began to cry. I went to the hospital and there were bodies everywhere.
“In addition to Papa Daniel, there was the guard supervisor, who was called Papa Jean-Paul Yainam.
“When we arrived everyone was running, crying, hugging. We went to the O.P.D. (the external consultation area)—there were eleven village chiefs killed there. That’s where the meeting was.
“We did the triage—we found three survivors. And among the three was one M.S.F. guard who had a bullet in his abdomen. He had a severe hemorrhage. The doctor took him straight to surgery.
“We began to search for people to donate blood, but the guard died at the block. Then other people in the neighborhood who were attacked began to arrive at the hospital—they began to bring their survivors. We were all together—staff, expat, inpat—to stabilize those who were still alive. That Saturday everyone spent the night in the hospital.
“Will decided to evacuate the staff—on Sunday a plane came and took one part of the team. [Will] asked me if I had the courage to stay one more day while M.S.F. came to get the rest of the survivors. I stayed with my other colleagues. On Monday, two M.S.F.-France cars came from Paoua, and on Tuesday, we made a convoy with four cars. The chief of our mission, Stephano, stayed with us.
“We stopped at Bossangoa, where the team was waiting to greet us. We hugged, cried, ate together, and then continued.
“After one month, they asked if we were ready to go back to work. They offered us a choice: Grimari, Bossangoa, or Zemio—Grimari is an emergency project, which is what I chose. I didn’t lose my courage to continue to work.”
It is a fact universally known that in Lima, if you are a lady of beauty, you are likely to be a whore. I learned this when I was around thirteen, and my mother was obsessed with me being a lady of the night, too. She liked to check my pockets to see if I had extra money, money I couldn’t account for, a domestic IRS of my little, never-been-kissed vagina. But I digress.
I’ve been wanting to write about the women in my family for some time, but haven’t known where to start. I’ve always located them in a nineteenth-century rural world of dusty roads and wooden carts, like the ones carrying the thirteen-year-old prostitute Eréndira and her abuela desalmada in the Gabriel García Márquez story. Their Peruvian lives ooze a vague Vargas Llosa air, but the places they hailed from would have been irrespirable for his bourgeoisie. Melchora, my great-grandmother, was a native of Huánuco, a small village at the center of the Andean plain, a yellow world trapped between jungle and mountains. She couldn’t read or write, though it really didn’t matter; she spoke Quechua, and Quechua is a spoken language—its real life exists between mouths and ears, though it can be transcribed. Melchora loved going to the movies and yelling at the screen, especially at the villains: You are as ugly as your deeds! Melchora married an Irishman, Byrne, who beat her frequently and was drunk all the time. Eventually he left, and Melchora moved to La Victoria, a shoddy neighborhood in Lima, along with her two daughters, Olga and Ana, and a retarded little boy, Pepe.
Ana was the prettiest: by the time she was twelve a line of suitors had already formed in front of her. Men came to the house and offered their charms and gifts: platters of carne seca, furniture, ham, jewelry. Ana loved dressing up and dancing. She was wispy at the waist, she had wide Bambi eyes, and she loved getting dolled up in capri pants to dance boleros at the Lima clubs. Sometimes she wore jasmine in her hair like La flor de la Canela, a bolero heroine, the Madonna of the Rímac. She enjoyed the vanity of the temptress; she had fun with it.
Once a young man came to visit the family and impressed Melchora: he was well-spoken, and successful in the jewelry business. He was very short, not particularly handsome, and Olga didn’t like him one bit. She assumed he was coming for her sister, but Ana wasn’t staying much at home; she would disappear for days in a row, while Olga took care of little Pepe. One morning, when Olga was getting ready for school, Melchora told her she couldn’t afford to return the gifts and she had to marry Jorge. Olga Byrne left the school and the house to marry my grandfather, Jorge Washington, absurdly named thus because, even though he was Peruvian and his father owned an anarchist newspaper, he was born on the Fourth of July. Ana was not planning on returning any gifts. She left school and moved out to the Rímac neighborhood, where she started seeing a man no one knew. The transition from gifts to soles must have happened at some point, when she had to distribute the earnings, and he became her pimp.
One night, on the way home after the bolero club, he began beating her in the street. She pushed back, took off her pumps, and tried to hit him with the heel. He went on beating her and she kept yelling but people in the Rímac were used to having their night air sprinkled with girls’ screams. He pulled her by the hair down the block as she crawled and cried for help. He kicked and a part of her would move, stimulus and response, like a question and answer or a body spasm. At some point she didn’t move anymore and he tied her body to a wooden cart, a carretilla, for everyone to see. I see him angry and euphoric, riding her dead body on the street and yelling puta de mierda. He did this till dawn, perhaps drunk. He was still babbling puta at the air, or he went into hiding; versions differ. Her body was found naked in broad daylight, rotting in the Rímac river air. Someone found the broken shoes and gave what was left of them to Melchora. She burned them.
Ana had two children who went to live with my grandmother. One of them was apparently my mother. She was careful to destroy all photographs of herself as a child, so nobody would notice the resemblance.
In the summer of 1998, my best friend and I went to the Greek island of Kythira: birthplace of Aphrodite (sprung from her father’s seed in the island’s waters), birthplace of modernist disenchantment (Baudelaire, expecting a paradise of love, found instead a hanged corpse), and conveniently located between the Greek mainland and Crete. We were backpackers making our way by land and sea from Rome to Istanbul. We had spent almost all our savings just getting from Australia to Europe. We were twenty but we looked younger; we were younger. We were tender, shy, bookish girls from suburban Sydney; we lived in an ecstasy of passionate innocence rendered largely undetectable by our extreme politeness. This politeness meant we agreed to have dresses we couldn’t afford sewn for us in Athens, strangely modest floral cotton shifts that made us look as if we’d just stepped off a nineteenth-century prairie. We agreed to get into the car of an aggressively solicitous man called Christos who wanted us to come with him to Marathon. These things, and others of their kind, we agreed to. And yet if E and I had been visited on that trip by golden Apollo offering a night of corybantic frenzy or an initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, we would have turned him down. Politely.
Actually, E might not have declined Apollo. In search of beauty, she would push at the closed door of any church while I hovered behind her. I was anxious about catching the right bus, turning down the right street, having the right change for the public toilets. I was intimidated by the gorgeous bulk of the Parthenon. I was continually hustling us off public transport in the wrong places because I was so worried we’d missed the right ones. I was the one who bought our ferry tickets to Kythira and was sure, when the boat stopped at a small port on a spit of land, that this was where we should disembark—absolutely sure, although no one else got off there. The ferry terminal—the only nearby building—was closed. Two taxis waited at the terminal; we waved them both away. Taxis were expensive. We would walk.
We had spent the day travelling and now it was late afternoon. The sea was blue and everywhere; there was much more sea than land. Land was a low greenish hill, treeless, visible across a causeway. From this distance—and the causeway was longer than it had seemed from the boat—we could make out a few buildings. We assumed that, as we grew closer, more buildings would materialise, if not by magic then because our guidebook promised them. And as we walked and evening approached and lights came on in what we assumed were windows, a town did appear to gather itself on the slope of the hill; so that when we arrived, finally, and found a village of eight or nine buildings, it seemed even smaller than it was. Most of the buildings were modest white houses along an empty beachfront; one was a small restaurant; behind them stood a complex of holiday apartments. The proprietor of the restaurant assured us that we were on Kythira, just the wrong side of it. He could call for a taxi to take us to the main town, but we couldn’t afford it. We had no cash and there was nowhere to withdraw money; we could exchange traveller’s checks at the ferry terminal but it wouldn’t open until an hour before the next boat, on Monday afternoon. It was Friday evening.
It’s not so terrible to be stranded for three days in a village on a Greek island. We accepted this at once; accepted, too, that we would live off the food we had with us (a jar of Nutella and a packet of spaghetti) and use E’s emergency credit card to stay in one of the holiday apartments. These were opened especially for us. Our room was far nicer than any other we stayed in on that trip (there were, for example, no bloodstains on the mattresses). So we were in good spirits as we walked down to the beach to swim. The sun had set but the air was warm and pink and we moved through it as if through soft smoke. The sea was the same temperature as the air. It seemed reasonable to imagine this as the birthplace of love.
A woman in a bathing suit emerged from one of the houses and waded out to join us. She carried her head carefully above the water; she told us this was to preserve her makeup. Her heavy mascara ran all the same, so that eventually she resembled one of the theatrical masks we’d admired in the mainland museums—the sorrowing ones meant to signify tragedy. In fact she was a cheerful woman. She had heard we were Australian. She told us that Australia was known as Big Kythira because more of the island’s residents had emigrated there than to any other place, that there were considerably more islanders in Australia than there were on Kythira, and that for a time after the Second World War the island’s economy was almost entirely supported by these southern emigrants. She proceeded to list the names of her expatriate friends and family. We didn’t know them, but she continued to offer names and we continued to apologise for not recognizing them. There was something both friendly and melancholy about standing in the Mediterranean as this stained, smiling woman recited what might as well have been a litany of the dead.
Swimming that evening, we noticed a large cave along the coast and thought we’d like to walk to it. The next day was hot and bright and we spent it reading on our balcony, but as the afternoon cooled we set out for the cave. We followed a path through dense grasses and low shrubs. The air softened, turned pink, and as we walked I became steadily overcome by dread. The cave seemed the source of some deep, vital terror, and my fear of it was unyielding. E felt the same way. I can’t remember which of us confessed first, but I remember the relief I felt when we agreed that we should go no farther. Perhaps this was, at last, Apollo’s invitation, and we did after all refuse it.
Hurrying back along the path, I heard E say, “I hope we don’t meet a wild dog.” Almost immediately, a great dark dog sprang up from the grass and ran snarling toward us. E, who seemed to have conjured it, blocked my body with hers. Just before it reached us, we heard a loud whistle; the dog, responding to this whistle, left the path.
Now we almost ran back to the village. To calm ourselves, we walked along a jetty that reached into the placid sea and sat with our feet in the water. Bright lamps illuminated the whole empty beachfront; these were the lights we had been reassured by as we walked across the causeway. The sea lapped and soothed. We talked quietly until the mood of the walk left us; then we laughed at the cave, the dog, and ourselves. As we laughed, a short, high wave rose out of the soundless sea and drenched us on the jetty. Then the water was calm again. The wave seemed so specific, so resolved, that without consultation we ran back to the hotel as if pursued.
We spent the rest of the weekend sleepless and baking in our sealed room; afraid of the island, we closed all the shutters and windows. Wrapped in wet towels and eating plain spaghetti, we waited for the Monday sun to rise. When it did, we shouldered our packs and walked to the ferry terminal to wait out the hours until our boat. Shortly before it arrived, the taxis we’d dismissed three days before came driving across the causeway.
On the ferry, E went to gaze at the food in the cash-only cafeteria. I stayed on deck, unwilling even to smell it. She returned and told me there were meatballs and a passenger playing a guitar. She slept and I stayed awake to make sure we ended up in the right place. I was hungry and tired and frightened, and because at that time I was someone who prayed, I prayed the rest of the way to Crete while E slept against her backpack. God, we were happy. We hadn’t written our books yet, and no one we loved had ever died.
“Her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life,” Philip Roth writes in My Life as a Man, the novel he published in 1974, the year my parents first met. When I came across Roth’s phrase, I knew it perfectly summed up my mother’s life.
My mother had her first stroke when she was thirty-six, younger than I am now as I’m writing this. It was a minor stroke, a warning of what was to come, and we all knew a much greater disaster would follow, we just didn’t know when. Compared with earthquakes, for strokes it’s the other way around—the aftershocks are the catastrophic part. In our case, the waiting and the grace lasted for twelve years. In the meantime my father retired, I finished high school, then university, then took my master’s degree and started my adult life. I sometimes think that my mother waited just the appropriate amount of time before changing my family’s history.
Patience is the measure of true love, especially when illness is involved. My father and I learned this in the very first days after transferring our lives to the hospital to be with my mother, who was left in a coma by the second stroke. The official diagnosis: acute ischemic stroke within the vertebrobasilar territory.
My mother came out of the coma after several long weeks (a couple of days before New Year’s Eve, which we celebrated drinking cans of beer hidden under the hospital bed) and only after two surgical procedures (the first of which was delayed several times by the lack of Rh-negative blood; the necessary bags of blood were supplied by a regional hospital and delivered by my uncle, my mother’s brother, in his car, in a handheld beer refrigerator), but she opened her eyes at the cost of shutting down her memory and her speech. Furthermore—though I should probably say furtherless—she lost sight in one eye, one arm was left completely paralyzed and one leg partly paralyzed: the entire right side of her body was gone. The stroke had claimed more than half of what used to be my mother.
For nearly six months, my father and I lived with her in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, moving from one place to another as soon as the maximum hospitalization time was reached. For a whole month we were accommodated by the intensive care unit where, almost every day, someone lost the battle against his or her own body. We placed our personal belongings in a cardboard box under my mother’s iron bed, and stayed at her bedside. In Romanian hospitals, when in such a critical condition, if you have no attendants, you are absolutely on your own and you wouldn’t want to be at the mercy of overworked nurses. In the neurosurgery unit, relatives are attending to what’s left of the lives of those attacked from within their own brain. And my mother needed us—or I had better use the passive and say that we were needed to supervise her coma, and then her recovery: to watch over her drips, to adjust her bandages, to feed her (with a straw shortened to a third of its length, because she was too weak to draw in through the whole thing), to clean and wash her (using tissues), to anoint her and especially to turn her over in bed, in various positions. The body of a paralyzed person is like a fruit starting to rot, once fallen on the ground: unless you move it constantly, it develops bedsores.
The hardest part, however, was that, once out of the coma, my mother no longer recognized us (at some point she called me by a strange girl’s name) and had no idea what we were all doing there. But even if she had recognized us, she couldn’t have spoken. And it is silence that patience finds hardest to withstand.
In those months spent in hospitals, then in rehabilitation centers—when I covered the day shift and my father the night shift—we had more than one patient to assist. With no nurses and no attendants around, out of sympathy and sudden bonding, we found ourselves in the position of attending to anyone who needed help. We fed, we washed and we turned around in their beds the paralyzed bodies of strangers, mostly old women who had been abandoned by their families. Our own closest relatives had enough of our drama and, after a while, they stopped calling. Fortunately, we ourselves benefited from the solicitude and kindness of other strangers who would bring us warm food or tacitly replace us when we fell asleep, exhausted, on a chair or leaning against a radiator. At some point a very nice woman was so impressed by my father’s devotion she developed a crush on him.
Assisting in my mother’s recovery was similar to raising a child. She lost almost ninety pounds in the months spent in hospitals. We bought her new clothes from the children’s section. And diapers. Before changing diapers for my own child, I changed diapers for my mother. Our parts were reversed: I mirrored the gestures she had once made with me. I had to teach her to hold her head up again, to chew solid food, to use her left hand (for brushing her teeth, for example), to make her first steps dragging her limp leg along. Before helping her utter her first words and before rebuilding her memory by recounting and explaining to her the family photos (she was herself a photo that had been washed out along with the shirt in the pocket of which it had been forgotten), we had to teach her gestures and sounds by which she could let us know if she was thirsty or needed to be taken to the toilet. We built pulleys around the house (hammering nails in the door casing and attaching straps) for her to be able to move around and for her to strengthen the muscles unaffected by paralysis. We also used cords, tied to her right leg, in order to pull her foot and help her take small steps. For a while she was our personal life-size mute puppet.
My life as a man began when my mother became merely an extra on our family set. Overnight, my father and I had to play parts we weren’t right for, parts we had never rehearsed. Little did we know about cooking, sewing and starching, about washing the curtains in the spring or salting vegetables in the autumn. Little did we know about caring for a home without the apprehension and the touch of a woman. Little did we know about a life without the wife and mother who had offered us everything on a plate. Little did we know about attending to her body, so different from ours. Little did we know what to do without the voice of a woman to tell us what to do.
But if you were to ask us now, neither my father nor I would say that it was really difficult, caught as we were in the turmoil of all things that needed to be done. Anyway, we never complained; we never asked for help or for compassion, and when it came, it embarrassed us. The fact that any day one of the much-awaited miracles could happen—for her to start speaking or walking on her own—gave us courage and strengthened our patience for facing the scarce and the unknown.
Today, twelve years on, we are no longer waiting for a miracle. For the first four or five years after the accident, my father clung to his hope and took my mother to rehabilitation facilities and spa resorts around the country. He even took her, without my knowledge, to monasteries in the mountains, in caves and forests, lighting dozens of candles and paying monks to say special prayers from old holy books. But now, my father and I have resigned ourselves to being utterly helpless against my mother’s voiceless frustration and sadness. I can’t even remember her voice anymore, the recording of which, lasting as long as a laugh and a four-second witty line, remains on a videotape from a distant cousin’s wedding.
Mother, or rather what’s left of her, has become the older sister I never had. I don’t know what she means to my father now, but I know that his patience (or should I say his love) has been challenged much more than mine in these twelve years in which he has been the one to continually look after her, day after day, night after night. My father has also become an older brother, for that matter. Our family ended then, in the evening of November 22, and what we have now is something different, something spiritually superior, as I sometimes think; or just a huge injustice, as I think most of the time.
Patience describes not only the extent and the quality of my love for my mother or my relation to the ideas of fate or divinity, but also the way I confront the world and especially the cruel and sometimes useless medical system. For two years we had to take my mother every six months to be examined by an assessment board for the disabled. During a humiliating evaluation, we had to persuade the board members that my mother’s limbs were truly paralyzed and that she really couldn’t speak, she was not faking it. Finally, it took an intervention and a small bribe to get the permanent certificate according to which my mother fell into grade 1 disability, meaning severe locomotor disability and the due disability support pension for her and for my father, her legal attendant.
Our story has a happy end, though, and our life is only partly cloudy. We have become accustomed to living and enjoying what we have left. Fortunately, my mother is fairly autonomous now: she can get dressed and move on her own; she can feed herself without our help. She can walk, using crutches, in the garden or to the lake quite near the country house, she can thumb through family photo albums and cultural magazines (especially the ones where I’m contributing or I give interviews), she watches TV, she listens to the radio (French or Italian pop songs of the sixties are her favorites), she can put things in order in the kitchen and in the bathroom. She has amazing single-handed abilities: with only two fingers she can tie a double shoelace knot in just seventeen seconds. One day she even killed a small water snake by using her bare left hand—she happily brought it home, like a cat with a mouse!
But, most important, she has recovered her memory and her clarity of mind, even though she can’t express them by ordinary language. She can’t read or write either (mixed aphasia is the medical term for her condition) and her CT scan shows a huge eclipse in the left parietal lobe, where the damaged cerebral area was removed. We often joke about that together, saying that she used to talk too much anyway. The few words she can now utter, sometimes repetitively (echolalically) or in a special syntax, are, despite causing her enormous frustration, an endless source of outlandishness, wit and humor. Imagine someone with a complex interior life who can express herself only in semi-haiku with a limited vocabulary.
The stroke made my mother a poet. It was not I who wrote the daily notes that were to become the long fragmentary poem that is my first book, Vîntureasa de plastic, but she who suggested image after image, disclosed metaphor after metaphor, dictated word after word, drumming the rhythm of each line against the hospital bed. I became her voice in another dimension. I just transcribed; I was the carbon paper between her and the rest of the world. That was the reason I kept the manuscript in my desk drawer for six years and published it only when I knew for certain that I had written for my own sake, that I had not traded on my family’s tragedy just to make literature, that I hadn’t flaunted my pain and my despair for the sake of literary glory. Moreover, I needed time to put up with the indecency effect triggered by displaying myself through poetry.
She gave me an artistic voice. Sometimes I think my mother sacrificed her own brain for me to make a proper entrance in literature. And sometimes I think the opposite—that my entry to literature required my mother’s sacrifice. Anyway, I have no idea what kind of writer I would have become without my mother’s metamorphosis and I will never be able to genuinely enjoy the gift of poetry—which I have abandoned ever since, for that matter. With every positive review, with every literary award, with every public reading, with every translation of my poems, I became more certain that I had been given poetry only to renounce it. For how could I have kept writing poetry after that and about something else? If I truly am or if I ever was a poet, then I am the poet of only one book, just as I am the son of only one mother.
In all these years, I must admit, I lost my patience with my mother several times. I was tired and I rebuked her, I yelled at her, I once lost my temper and even bullied her. I apologized in tears and felt ashamed. I feel very ashamed even now, when thinking about it. Actually—what am I saying?—sometimes it was and still is quite hard. But neither my father nor I would ever admit to that. Compassion still embarrasses us; admiration of our devotion embarrasses us even more. Because we love her the way she is, and love is not pompous, it is not inflated, it bears all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Endures all things.
Translated from the Romanian by Alexandra Coliban
My problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to be for the way I’ve been. I’m either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all sorry.
My problem is some nights I come in late and forget to lock the door behind me. Some nights I leave the porch light on. Some nights I have been touching my knee to another’s beneath a table.
My problem is I spend a great deal of my time curating warm, inviting workspaces that I do not then use. I am always moving my desk from one room to another, always rearranging the furniture then walking into it in the night, always taking over the kitchen table.
My problem is I get an e-mail re: moment of silence but get it too late and the moment has passed and the moment was silent—I can recall it, only a half hour or so earlier—but while the moment was silent, in that I was alone, working, and silent, I did not, I don’t think, use the moment to consider those we’ve lost, their sacrifices, nor the losses and sacrifices of their families, as instructed. At least these were not considered any more so than they ordinarily are, which is a little. My problem is I have my own moment of silence and think not of victims, their families, but of the perpetrators, and the wrong ones, the early ones, their trench coats.
My problem is not that I can’t find my phone, keys, wallet, sunglasses, regular glasses, shoes, purse, book, pen, lipstick, earrings, watch, mug of cold coffee, but that I suspect these things are all hanging out somewhere without me.
My problem is I don’t miss you.
My problem is I could not imagine how final death is and neither could you.
My problem is I have the job she never got to have and the education she never got to have and I’m intimidating and not as nurturing as anyone thought I’d be. My problem is I didn’t convert. My problem is I’m all set.
My problem was born in Las Vegas at University Medical Center on April 28, 1957. My problem was almost fifty. My problem taught me to drive stick shift, to buy two boxes of dye, for we had the same thick hair. My problem taught me the names of all my body parts and that I decided who could and could not touch them. My problem is I never got to say goodbye, or I was always saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye so the meaning absconded, as meaning does.
My problem is I grew up poor. My problem is I’m not as well read as he thought I’d be. My problem is I’m derivative, a copy of a copy, all faded.
My problem is I have the thing where the wires in my brain are crossed and everything that’s supposed to be joyous is frightening. My problem is we married other people. My problem is I am hardly ever putting one foot in front of the other. I have a rock collection of rocks whose names I do not know and do not pretend to know.
My problem is I am only a little bothered by all of this, and want to change not at all.
Today we rode in the world’s most beautiful cab. A few minutes after we’d gotten in, the driver—middle-aged, and wearing glasses—passed us a notebook. Soojeong thought for a moment it was a Christian ambush, but the man explained that the book was where his clients wrote messages. While I was adding something, my wife found a second notebook, apparently much older. The first entry was from 2010. Fifteen minutes later we left the cab in Yeouido. Soojeong, who had been reading throughout the entire journey—she never does this as she suffers from car sickness—had tears in her eyes. She had read several messages, and even a short poem about the wind written by the cabdriver. It was a simple poem, pretty, not at all sentimental, she told me. But what impressed her most was that almost every one of the messages had an intimate, confessional tone. It was as if all those people had been waiting for that particular cab to unburden themselves. “I feel alone, my wife is hardly ever home, my son hates me.” “I’ve just come out of hospital. Apparently the diagnosis is more serious than I thought, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.” “On my way to see her for the second time. Very excited. I think she’s the best girl I’ve met in a long time.” “Our mother died today.” I guess it was life in a pure state, and for that reason my eyes also misted.
I once dated a woman who used to wake up in a bad mood because she had been wasting her time having dumb dreams. We argued about this a couple of times. I told her she couldn’t control what she dreamed, so there was no reason to be so enraged. No one dream is better than another. She knew this, but still went on complaining. Carl Jung said dreams aren’t completely personal; in fact, they are part of a great network. During deep, early-morning sleep, for two or three hours, we become tributaries of an interminable river, a universal dream. I woke this morning with the memory of a couple of ordinary, very common dreams. One included a speech by a Colombian politician. I lay there for quite a while, wondering why I had dreamed such a dream. It was uninspiring, and that made me feel ashamed, as if it was my duty to contribute to Jung’s communal experience with more intricate examples, like the one I had last winter, which had surprised me. It involved a town made of paper, and a thrilling escape from North Korea through a tunnel excavated in the floor of a beauty parlor.
We are invited to a birthday celebration in a bar in Gangnam. The place is decorated differently from other establishments in the area: ultramodern lighting, roomy sofas, designer lamps. Ours is a bar for office workers with decor dating back to sometime in the nineties. A lot of wood and wallpaper. I order a whisky. The bow-tied waiter brings me an amber-colored tumbler, and a separate glass with a perfect specimen of ice. It is a single chunk the size of a tennis ball, cut like a diamond. I am obsessed by its geometric form, its many facets. They must have a machine just for making perfect chunks of ice. I pour in the whisky, and the ice glimmers like a star. I get bored. The birthday girl—supposedly a fashion designer—has decided to use her birthday as a sort of hijacking to promote her brand. A clothes rack begins to do the rounds, pushed by a friend who modeled for the catalogue all the guests are handed at some point in the evening. The supposed designer has left her job in a bank and wants to earn a living selling garments. A story shared by thousands of young Koreans fed up with abusive bosses, unpaid overtime, weekends spent in the office, useless meetings in which all that matters is appearances. I get bored. Fortunately there is that marvelous piece of arctic ice.
There was a flyer posted on the door. They’re usually for fast-food delivery services. This one was different. I couldn’t decipher it. I put it on the kitchen table rather than crumpling and binning it. In the evening, when Soojeong came back from the academy, I showed it to her. She explained that it’s a kind of illegal loan scheme. With just one phone call you can immediately obtain a sum of money without a guarantor or any documentation. You just have to sign a piece of paper. It’s a pretty common service. I asked her about repayments. Anyone who falls behind is beaten up, or worse. Before we went to sleep, she told me there was even an old story related to those loans: the debtors are kidnapped and taken to one of the thousands of tiny islands south of the peninsula. There, the loan sharks sell them as slave labor to the owners of anchovy boats.
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa in 1981 and moved to London with her family in 1986. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize; was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award; and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in 2013 and was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Mohamed was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. She lives in London and is working on her third novel.